Category: freedom from religion

Guardian columnist calls for banning “hate speech”

March 24, 2018 • 11:15 am

The UK is well on its way to legalizing censorship of offensive views, either by deplatforming those whose speech is politically inconvenient, by constructing proscribed lists of speakers (Britain’s National Union of Students), or by the government simply not allowing rabble-rousers into the country to give talks. Pushing the censorship along, Nesrine Malik, a Guardian columnist of Sudanese descent, has a new article “Hate speech leads to violence. Why would liberals defend it?”

Right off the bat you can ask two questions. “What does Malik define as hate speech?” and “Does hate speech really lead to violence?”

She answers neither question, but gives examples of the kind of speakers she thinks should be banned. These include Lutz Bachmann, a right-wing German nativist who was denied entry to the UK for intending to address a “free speech rally” at London’s Hyde Park—a traditional sanctuary for all speech.  She also mentions the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos as well as Martin Sellner, an Austrian “white supremacist” who was trying to enter the country but was refused entry; Tommy Robinson—apparently someone else who also doesn’t deserve hearing—gave Sellner’s talk for him.

Clearly, Malik doesn’t feel that extreme right-wingers should be giving talks; that is, Malik has appointed herself The Decider. Yet these people are still worth listening to. For one thing, you don’t know what somebody believes until they open their mouths. For another, if you can’t defend yourself against the people you wish to censor, you don’t deserve speech yourself. Odious speech is one way to examine, hone, and refine your own views. Finally, those who practice “hate speech” may say things useful to hear. In the U.S., for example, restrictions on immigration, which are clearly needed in some form, are espoused mainly by the Right; if you listen to the Left, you might think that they want completely open borders, something that simply isn’t sustainable. I, for one, constantly listen to views on immigration from all political sides, as some reforms are needed but it’s hard to decide which ones.

Those who have been said to practice “hate speech” in the UK don’t fall within Malik’s definition, either. Maryam Namazie, who campaigns for Muslim reform, has been repeatedly deplatformed and even denounced by feminist organizations, all for trying to oppose sharia law and other forms of Muslim illiberalism. Others on the Left who have been deplatformed or censored include  Kate Smurthwaite (Goldsmith’s College), Germaine Greer  (the University of Cambridge, considered a “hater” of transgender rights), and gay rights activist Peter Tatchell.

One could argue that the words of all of these people could in principle cause remote violence, as could video games, books, or movies. But, at least in the U.S., the kind of speech that incites violence is illegal only if it incites it on the spot, posing a “clear and present danger” to listeners and others in the area. Otherwise, the violence is not the fault of the speaker, but those who commit it. Those who criticize Islamic doctrine, such as Namazie, are particularly susceptible to the “inciting violence” canard, as Islamism has made violence, or the threat of it, a useful tool for shutting up (and shutting down) their critics.

Malik makes several mistakes in her piece. One is saying that right-wing people are not serious practitioners of free speech, but merely “grifters” seeking to get attention.  Well, I’m not sure if there’s a distinction between wanting to espouse your ideas and wanting to get attention, but saying that we should ban those who “exploit” free speech in this way is deeply misguided. Malik:

Characters such as Bachmann are no innocents practising their freedom of speech: they are cynical exploiters of it. They’re little better than loiterers waiting round the corner to jump on your windshield, pretending to be hurt, shaking you down for money. It’s a scam, trading notoriety and worse for attention. Why do we fall for it?

By “why should we fall for it?”, I presume that Malik means “we shouldn’t allow these people to speak freely.” Further, she asserts, wrongly, that claiming freedom of speech is identical to claiming that someone deserves a platform:

Most freedom of speech debates now start on the false premise that denying someone a platform is censorship. So we must begin with the correct one, which is that freedom of speech is freedom from punishment. If you are not being convicted and penalised by the state for speaking, then you have freedom of speech.

Well, that might be the legal definition in the UK, if they even have “free speech” in the law (someone enlighten me), but it’s not in the U.S. In the U.S., being denied a platform can be grounds for a violation of the First Amendment. If a public university, for example, regularly allows Left-wing speakers a venue but not those from the Right, or allows speakers to criticize Christianity but not Islam, those are grounds for a lawsuit. Right now the Freedom from Religion Foundation has a suit in federal court arguing that allowing religious people to deliver invocations in Congress, but not a secularist like Dan Barker, violates the First Amendment.

Further, there’s the spirit of free speech that needs to be defended along with its legal use. Even if a private college doesn’t have to allow someone to speak, they are doing their students a disservice by banning speakers who say things that aren’t politically fashionable, as Brandeis did with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Really, would it be useful for a university to prevent her from speaking to students, even if that university had the right to do so? Should they also ban discussions of how to deal with transgender people, affirmative action, abortion, Zionism, and other touchy subjects? I don’t think so.

Finally, Malik gives not a single example of the assertion in her title: “Hate speech leads to violence.” I suppose she could have argued that Charlie Hebdo was an example of “hate speech” that led to violence—except it wasn’t hate speech, and no humanist I know of would claim that the French magazine should have been banned because it offended Muslims who can retaliate with murder.  Trying to shut down all speech that is said to provoke violence merely enables people like Antifa or Islamists to threaten violence as a way of silencing views they don’t like. It’s clear that in the UK the government is afraid of reprisal when Islam is criticized, but not Christianity.

I’ve said all this before, and am growing weary of saying it again. I’ll finish with the claim that Malik fails to identify The Decider beyond herself, and ends her piece with the bizarre claim that she—a Guardian columnist with a regular public platform—doesn’t have her speech defended:

Useful liberals have swallowed two freedom of speech myths whole: the redefinition of the term to encompass not only freedom from persecution but the right to a platform; and the delusion that freedom of speech is a neutral principle uncontaminated by history or social bias. There are hard choices here. Too often, those who should know better argue for the wrong ones. They fight to their deaths to defend the rights of Bachmann, Sellner and the other peddlers of hate – but not mine.

Wrong. Any liberal would fight just as hard to defend Malik’s speech as that of the people she names. Try me! It’s just that censorship these days seems to come more often from the Left than the Right. When it does come from the Right, as when Donald Trump threatens the press, we’ll be up in arms calling him out. It’s just that Trump hasn’t done anything about this beyond yammering—unlike Britain’s National Union of Students, which has indeed prevented people from speaking.

4 in 10 American Millennials, and half of Europeans, think that government should be able to ban “hate speech”

February 25, 2018 • 1:30 pm

This 2015 Pew poll was mentioned by Lionel Shriver in her piece about the policing of literature tthat I discussed the other day. It shows a surprising degree of censoriousness in various Western countries.  Pew asked people in the U.S. and Europe the following question:

We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things.

In the US people were sub-classified by age, sex, political affiliation, white vs. nonwhite, and degree of education.

Now in the U.S., this is a straight First Amendment question, as indicated by “whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things”, and therefore 100% of people agreeing with that fundamental freedom should agree, regardless of whether they think it’s right or ethical to offend minority groups. (And of course some things that offend some people in minority groups, like the wearing of dreadlocks, are contentious.)

In fact, 4 out of ten Millennials (18-34) agreed that the First Amendment should be ditched. As people got older, they got less censorious.  Among all ages, women were 10% more likely to favor government censorship, and Democrats nearly twice as likely as Republicans (35% vs 18%, respectively).  That appears to show that the Right is more open to free speech than the Left. But of course this isn’t about free speech in general, but free speech that offends minorities. Thus Republicans might favor it more simply because they don’t care whether minorities get offended.

The more education one gets, the less likely one is to favor such censorship.

What surprises me was the degree of general assent to government censorship. But again, maybe people simply don’t understand the First Amendment or how it’s been interpreted. Perhaps they just were triggered by the phrase “statements offensive to minority groups”. But still, if you understand that Amendment—as all Americans should—you should be against government censorhip in toto. 

I’m curious, as well, what people consider “minority groups” in this survey. Muslims and Jews—and in fact all religions save Protestantism (53% of Americans)—are in the minority in the U.S. Does that mean that these people think that the government should censor statements that offend Jews, Catholics, and Muslims, but that it’s okay to offend Protestants? After all what one construes as a “minority group” depends on the beholder. I suspect most people think of it as “racial minority groups”, like blacks and Hispanics: groups traditionally subject to bigotry.

 

But wait! There’s more! It’s even worse in Europe, where 70% of Germans and nearly half of the French think the government should ban such speech (see graph below). Those countries, of course, have hate speech laws that don’t exist in the U.S. To quote Pew:

In Europe, where long-simmering racial tensions are of a different nature, compounded by the recent flow of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, people are more willing than Americans to accept government controls on speech against minorities. A median of 49% across the six EU nations surveyed say this compared with 28% of Americans.

That’s a big difference.  I suppose that you could say that, okay, Germany is just as well off as the U.S., or even better off, so why can’t we modify the First Amendment in the U.S. to ban offensive statements? The problem is that interpreting “statements offensive to minority groups” is very slippery, and ropes in some issues things that should be criticized, like religious beliefs and actions. Also, I suspect that in the EU, enforcement of these speech laws is either lax or nonexistent.

The FFRF wins a big one: federal court rules that ministers’ tax-free housing allowances violate the Constitution

October 12, 2017 • 9:00 am

You may know that American ministers have some tax advantages under the law: they often get a housing allowance from their church, and that allowance, in contrast to non-ministers who get such perks, is free from taxes.  Here’s the stipulation from the Internal Revenue Service code:

A licensed, commissioned, or ordained minister may be able to exclude from income the fair rental value of a home (a parsonage) or a housing allowance provided as compensation for ministerial services performed as an employee. A minister who is furnished a parsonage may exclude from income the fair rental value of the parsonage, including utilities. However, the amount excluded can’t be more than reasonable compensation for the minister’s services.

A minister who receives a housing allowance may exclude the allowance from gross income to the extent it’s used to pay expenses in providing a home. Generally, those expenses include rent, mortgage interest, utilities, repairs, and other expenses directly relating to providing a home. The amount excluded can’t be more than the reasonable compensation for the minister’s services.

This exemption—the tax-free housing allowance can also be used by ministers for stuff like home repairs, cable television fees, towels, bedding home decor, and computers—costs the government an estimated $700 million per year in taxes, and is used widely. As Christianity Today reports (and they’re pissed off!):

CT previously examined whether pastors’ homes are really that different from everyone else’s. According to the 2018 Compensation Handbook for Church Staff, 81 percent of fulltime senior pastors receive a housing allowance, while 11 percent receive a parsonage allowance. For fulltime solo pastors, 67 percent receive a housing allowance, while 27 percent receive a parsonage allowance; among part-time solo pastors, 59 percent receive a housing allowance, while 10 percent receive a parsonage allowance.

This is a blatantly unconstitutional provision because it gives religious people a tax advantage not shared by nonbelievers. In other words, it privileges religion—a violation of the First Amendment.

On that basis, in 2013 the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) sued the government in the Federal District Court in Wisconsin—and won! (You can see the court’s ruling here.) But the government appealed, and the appeals court overruled the lower court on the grounds that the plaintiffs—the FFRF and its co-Presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker—didn’t have “standing” to sue. In other words, they couldn’t prove they’d been injured by the policy, which is necessary to bring a lawsuit.

But the FFRF is tenacious. As GOP USA notes,

The foundation then had two employees who got housing allowances try to claim the exemption on their tax forms, and when the IRS denied them, the foundation re-filed the lawsuit.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said they followed exactly what the 7th Circuit said they would need to do to have standing in order to bring the lawsuit.

“I think they are going to have a hard time saying we don’t have standing,” she said. “They’re going to have to look at the merits.”

 The Alexandria News explains more:

In November 2014, the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out that victory—not on the merits but on the question of standing—arguing that [FFRF Co-Presidents] Barker and Gaylor had not yet sought a refund of their housing allowance from the IRS. Accordingly, they sought them and when denied, went back to court.

FFRF, a national state/church watchdog based in Madison, Wisconsin, renewed its historic challenge of the housing allowance in April 2016. Sued are Steve Mnuchin, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and John Koskinen, IRS Commissioner. The case also had religious intervenors as defendants.

Plaintiffs are FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, and Ian Gaylor, representing the estate of President Emerita Anne Nicol Gaylor, whose retirement was paid in part as a housing allowance.

The new ruling, by the same judge in the same Wisconsin court, was issued on October 6, and it’s another victory for the FFRF. Click on the screenshot below to see the ruling:


The take-home message:

Here are some quotes from Judge Barbara Crabb’s ruling as reported by the News:

“Although defendants try to characterize § 107(2) as an effort by Congress to treat ministers fairly and avoid religious entanglement, the plain language of the statute, its legislative history and its operation in practice all demonstrate a preference for ministers over secular employees,” writes Crabb, for the Western District of Wisconsin.

“As I noted in the earlier lawsuit,” Crabb writes, “there is no reasonable interpretation of the statute under which the phrase minister of the gospel could be construed to include employees of an organization whose purpose is to keep religion out of the public square.”

Any reasonable observer would conclude that the purpose and effect of the statute is to provide financial assistance to one group of religious employees without any consideration to the secular employees who are similarly situated to ministers, Crabb noted. “Under current law, that type of provision violates the establishment clause,” she adds.

“In reaching this conclusion, I do not mean to imply that any particular minister is undeserving of the exemption or does not have a financial need for one. The important point is that many equally deserving secular employees (as well as other kinds of religious employees) could benefit from the exemption as well, but they must satisfy much more demanding requirements despite the lack of justification for the difference in treatment.”

Crabb also discusses financial benefits to even wealthy ministers: “”Thus, an evangelist with a multimillion dollar home is entitled under § 107(2) to deduct the entire rental value of that home, even if it is not used for church purposes. (“Joel Osteen lives in a $10.5 million home and is entitled to exclude the fair rental value of that home so long as he spends that money on the home and his church allocates that amount to housing.”).”

You can also find this on page 4 of the ruling:

Ministers receive a unique benefit under § 107(2); it is not, as defendants suggest, part of a larger effort by Congress to provide assistance to employees with special housing needs. A desire to alleviate financial hardship on taxpayers is a legitimate purpose, but it is not a secular purpose when Congress eliminates the burden for a group made up of solely religious employees but maintains it for nearly everyone else.

Judge Crabb suggests some fixes for the law, but none of those involve favoring religion:

As I have discussed throughout this opinion, Congress could have enacted a number of alternative exemptions without running afoul of the First Amendment. For example, Congress could have accomplished a similar goal by allowing any of the following groups to exclude housing expenses from their gross income: (1) all taxpayers; (2) taxpayers with incomes less than a specified amount; (3) taxpayers who live in rental housing provided by 43 Case: 3:16-cv-00215-bbc Document #: 87 Filed: 10/06/17 Page 43 of 47 the employer; (4) taxpayers whose employers impose housing-related requirements on them, such as living near the workplace, being on call or using the home for work-related purposes; or (5) taxpayers who work for nonprofit organizations, including churches. Or some of these categories could be combined.

Make no mistake about it: this is a big victory, and churches are complaining loudly. Cry me a river! Some churches are whining that they may have to close without such advantages, but that’s too damn bad: they are entitled to no such tax privileges under U.S. law. If they can’t keep their enterprise going without taking advantage of illegal provisions, they shouldn’t be open.

The government will of course appeal, but now that the plaintiffs have standing, I can’t see on what grounds they could lose. This is clearly favoritism of religion. But of course the Supreme Court, where this might ultimately land, is deeply conservative, and might suss out some wonky rationale. If it does, that will be a serious erosion of the Constitution they’re supposed to follow.

Congrats to Annie Laurie, Dan, and the FFRF for this victory.

h/t: Woody

The U. S. moves toward theocracy: Congress aims to repeal the Johnson Amendment barring nonprofits (like churches) from endorsing candidates

July 7, 2017 • 1:00 pm

The Johnson Amendment, in effect since 1954, is in fact named after Lyndon Johnson, who introduced it as a congressman. It’s part of the U.S. Tax Code, and specifies behavior prohibited for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations (the amendment itself is the part in bold below):

26 U.S. Tax Code §501 Section C

(3) Corporations, and any community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition (but only if no part of its activities involve the provision of athletic facilities or equipment), or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals, no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual, no substantial part of the activities of which is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation (except as otherwise provided in subsection (h)), and which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.

These organizations, the most important of which are churches, are thus prohibited from siding with one candidate or party, or criticizing others. They are, however, allowed to engage in nonpartisan activities like voter-registration drives.

There are two reasons why this amendment is necessary in a secular country. First, churches are already subsidized by taxpayers with respect to property taxes, other taxes, and ministerial housing allowances, and if churches became partisan it would be partly at the taxpayers’ expense. Further, if you made a political donation to a church that endorsed a candidate or party, that donation would be tax-deductible (unlike other political contributions) and also by law would not be “disclosable” like other donations are. This would produce an invidious inconsistency in how political donations are made. Polls have shown that the public, most clergy, and nonprofit umbrella organizations favor this amendment and frown on churches being able to endorse candidates.

Trump has been against this amendment since he began running as a candidate; as Wikipedia notes:

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump called for the repeal of the amendment. On February 2, 2017, President Trump vowed at the National Prayer Breakfast to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment,  White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced to the press that the President “committed to get rid of the Johnson Amendment”, “allowing our representatives of faith to speak freely and without retribution”, and Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would allow all 501(c)(3) organizations to support political candidates, as long as any associated spending was minimal.

On May 4, 2017, Trump signed the “Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.” The executive order does not (nor can it) repeal the Johnson Amendment, nor does it allow preachers to endorse from the pulpit, but it does direct the Department of Treasury that “churches should not be found guilty of implied endorsements where secular organizations would not be.” Douglas Laycock, speaking to The Washington Post, indicated that he was not aware of any cases where such implied endorsements have caused problems in the past.

As the Washington Post reports, Congress is trying to do an end run around the tax code by gutting the government’s ability to investigate transgressions of this amendment:

Many pastors already ignore the so-called Johnson Amendment, and the IRS rarely investigates churches that violate a law that many clergy feel provides a chilling effect on their free speech. But some observers fear the language proposed in a new spending bill released this week would make it difficult for the IRS to investigate any claims of pulpit politicking or money flowing between houses of worship and political campaigns.

During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump targeted the Johnson Amendment as a big part of his pitch to religious conservatives, but because the amendment is law, repealing it would take an act of Congress.

Instead of trying to repeal the amendment, legislators appear to be targeting it through a spending bill that says the IRS can’t use funds to investigate a church for breach of the Johnson Amendment without the sign-off of the IRS commissioner, who must report to Congress on the investigation.

Why is this happening? Because, of course, it’s Trump and the Republicans catering to their conservative Christian base—a base that wants churches to endorse conservative candidates (those who are, for instance, anti-gay and anti-abortion). The Post also points out that if churches were allowed to engage in political endorsements, politicians could pressure churches by various means to direct their endorsements in a particular direction.

I’ll follow this measure over time to see if it passes. If it does, it’s just another breach in the real wall the U.S. needs: the one between church and state. It may not get the attention of the Great Mexican Wall, or  of the dismantling of Obamacare, but it’s part of the metastasizing theocracy that is part of Trump’s plan—though he’s probably an atheist—to appeal to his supporters.

h/t: Heather Hastie

The saga of NASA’s grant to theologians continues, with NASA violating the Constitution and its employees apparently behaving illegally

March 30, 2017 • 1:44 pm

If this doesn’t get me another Discovery Institute “Censor of the Year” award, I don’t know what will, for, as far as I remember, I discovered this bit of information. But the Freedom from Religion Foundation should be the real recipient, as it’s done every bit of the legwork and heavy lifting. The issue involves an illegal and unethical entanglement of the US government with Christian theology.

I discovered (and can’t remember where) that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, along with the John Templeton Foundation, awarded a $1.1 million dollar grant to the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) to study the social (read: theological) implications of extraterrestrial life. Of course we haven’t yet found any such life, but theologians need work to justify their existence, and what better way to keep them off the streets than to let them ponder the issue of what aliens would do if they encountered Jesus?

I reported what I found to the FFRF, adding on this site that I considered it unconstitutional for the US government to spend taxpayers’ money to fund an essentially Christian endeavor (the grant’s theologian recipients were nearly all Christians).

The FFRF then went to town, filing many requests under the Freedom of Information Act, with NASA stonewalling them all the way—refusing to give out information about how the grant was awarded or to divulge internal emails.  This raised suspicions that NASA had something to hide. It turns out (see below) that that seems to be the case.

More and more information eventually emerged. I reported on the continuing efforts on this site: you can get the background  here, here, here, and here

In June of last year, the FFRF asked NASA to withdraw its grant from the CTI, and renewed that request in August. No dice, of course.

Today the FFRF issued a press release about what it found, “FFRF protests large NASA grant used for religious purposes.” Looking through hundreds of pages of documents, FFRF lawyer Andrew Seidel found two things. First, NASA Technical Officer Mary Voytek, the official managing the grant application, appear to have had a questionable and likely unethical relationship with CTI director William Storrer, with Voytek accepting trips and gifts from CTI while the grant was being considered—before it was even given!   Second, the grant, as all of us suspected, violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against government promoting a particular religion, in this case Christianity.

Here’s the summary emailed to me by Andrew Seidel, much of which is in the FFRF announcment. I quote his email with permission:

After combing through the NASA records we discovered two things that are laid out in the two attached letters.
First, the grant was definitely unconstitutional. They hired eleven theologians with the money and one actual scientist. That wouldn’t be problematic if they were doing secular work, but they weren’t. The work proposed for the grant included:

·      formulating a “Christian response” to scientific studies on morality,
·      developing a new model of biblical interpretation,
·      relating themes from First Corinthians, a book in the Christian bible, to astrobiology,
·      the author of Christian Ethics applying those ethics to astrobiology,
·      reconciling a potential astrobiology discovery with Christian theology,
·      looking at how astrobiology would affect the Christian doctrine of redemption,
·      examining Christian ethics and Christian doctrines of human obligation,
·      looking at societal implications of astrobiology with “theological ethics,”
·      and writing a monograph on Christian forgiveness.

In short, NASA was paying for Christian apologetics.
Second, Mary Voytek [the NASA official in charge of awarding the grant] has a questionable and likely unethical relationship with William Storrar, the head of CTI. It looks like she was accepting gifts from Storrar and CTI when she was considering and managing their grant request and grant. If so, that violates federal law.
Also, we are doing another FOIA request going back to 2014 to determine the extent of the Voytek-Storrar relationship.

. . . We’re sending two letters. One that renews the state-church issues, which Voytek “investigated” and responded to previously. We’re asking for another investigation done by a competent, uninterested party. The second is to a few people in various offices that oversee ethics issues. They’ll have to investigate the issue once they get the letter.

You can read both of  those letters as links in the FFRF press release, which adds these details:

“We are informing NASA that it cannot constitutionally fund theology,” Seidel writes to NASA Astrobiology Institute Director Penelope Boston 
in his recent letter. “The Supreme Court has explicitly held that refusing to fund scholarships for theology is not religious discrimination under the First Amendment.”

Then there is the questionable relationship between Voytek and Storrar. While administering the first grant but prior to approving the supplemental grant to the Center, Voytek participated in a panel at a 2015 Center of Theological Inquiry conference in the United Kingdom. Emails reveal that the Center arranged for Voytek’s travel to and from this event. In another email sent during the same period, Voytek talks about a 2014 invitation for a trip to Florida to meet the Center’s board members and thanks Storrar for his “thoughtful gifts.” The records do not reveal the nature of these “thoughtful gifts.”

Employees of the executive branch of the United States of America “may not . . . accept a gift from a prohibited source,” according to federal law. A prohibited source includes any person who:

  • “does business or seeks to business with the employee’s agency.”

  • “is seeking official action by the employee’s agency,” or

  • “has interests that may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance 
of the employee’s official duties.”

The Center of Theological Inquiry is or was a prohibited source under each of these definitions. None of these gifts or the travel was disclosed, as required by law.

FFRF requests an inquiry into the nature of the relationship between Mary Voytek and William Storrar and a complete review of the grants awarded to the Center, including a determination as to whether the awards violated the Constitution by providing funds to a religious institution for research with a religious purpose and effect.

Remember, this is the pre-Trump NASA; and what it did, according to the FFRF and my own review of the documents, was to simply funnel taxpayer money into a dumb religious project, violating the Constitution. Voytek’s behavior, apparently schmoozing with the grant requestor and taking gifts from them before the grant was awarded, and then failing to report these gifts and trips to the government, seems to be blatantly illegal. She should resign.

Well, it’s a new administration now, and we’ll see what happens, but NASA should be ashamed of itself. Their money should be used for space exploration and the like, not theology! What an embarrassment!

FFRF versus the Ark Park

March 29, 2017 • 9:00 am

In this video, which the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) says was filmed covertly, FFRF lawyer Andrew Seidel talks about how Answers In Genesis, Ken Ham’s organization, sworn to purvey lies about biology to children, has benefited from taxpayer subsidies. (As you may remember, the Ark Encounter has a supposedly life-sized version of Noah’s Ark which contains, among other things, miniature dinosaurs.)

The land for Ham’s “Ark Encounter”, Seidel says, was given to the park, the organization is still benefiting from tax breaks (meaning the citizens of Kentucky subsidize it), and now public school children can get in for only $1. (The normal admission price for children 5-12 is $28.)

The FFRF, rightfully, is trying to ensure that no public school sends its kids on school-sponsored trip to the park, as that is indoctrination in a specific religion expressly prohibited by the First Amendment. I wasn’t aware that that such trips were happening, or were being planned by some schools, but it’s not only unconstitutional but detrimental to education.

The FFRF is my favorite secular/atheist organization, and I’d urge you to join. Of all the organizations of that genre, it’s the one that, I think, really gets the most stuff done, thanks to Dan Barker, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and their crack staff of lawyers and assistants. It’s only $40/year, and you get a swell monthly newspaper loaded with cool stuff.

BBC discusses historic court case on church-state separation

November 30, 2016 • 10:00 am

In 1956, a 16 year old Pennsylvania high school student named Ellery Schempp finally had enough of his school’s practice—shared by schools in other states (see below)—of reading ten verses from the Bible each morning, followed by a mandatory recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Schempp, who became a physicist as well as a mountaineer (he was part of the first expedition to climb Nanga Parbat), knew that this enforced religious exercise violated the First Amendment, as it was slanted towards a particular religion: Christianity. Even though Schempp was nominally religious (well, a Unitarian Universalist, a hairsbreadth from atheism), he decided to act.  He brought a Qur’an to class and refused to participate in the recitations. He was a brave young man.

Later Schempp, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, brought suit against the school district in a landmark case that wound up seven years later in the Supreme Court: Abington School District v. Schempp (1963). He and the ACLU won.

The BBC has just interviewed Schempp as part of a 15-minute Radio 4 documentary  about the case that you can hear by clicking on the screenshot below. (The BBC program is available in the US and should be elsewhere). It was one of the first cases to challenge the pervasive religiosity of the 1950s in America. And the show is well worth hearing.

screen-shot-2016-11-30-at-7-50-17-am

Here’s Wikpedia‘s summary of the court case:

Pennsylvania law, like that of four other states, included a statute compelling school districts to perform Bible readings in the mornings before class. Twenty-five states had laws allowing “optional” Bible reading, with the remainder having no laws supporting or rejecting Bible reading. In eleven of those states with laws supportive of Bible reading or state-sponsored prayer, the state courts had declared them unconstitutional.

The district court ruled in Schempp’s favor, and struck down the Pennsylvania statute. The school district appealed the ruling, and while that appeal was pending, the Pennsylvania legislature amended the statute to allow children to be excused from the exercises upon the written request of their parents. This change did not satisfy Schempp, however, and he continued his action against the school district, charging that the amendment of the law did not change its nature as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Because of the change in the law, the Supreme Court had responded to the school district’s appeal by vacating the first ruling and remanding the case to the district court. The district court again found for Schempp. The school district appealed to the Supreme Court again, and, on appeal, the case was consolidated with a similar Maryland case launched by Madalyn Murray.

The district court ruling in the second trial, in striking down the practices and the statute requiring them, made specific findings of fact that the children’s attendance at Abington Senior High School was compulsory and that the practice of reading 10 verses from the Bible was also compelled by law. It also found that:

“The reading of the verses, even without comment, possesses a devotional and religious character and constitutes in effect a religious observance. The devotional and religious nature of the morning exercises is made all the more apparent by the fact that the Bible reading is followed immediately by a recital in unison by the pupils of the Lord’s Prayer. The fact that some pupils, or theoretically all pupils, might be excused from attendance at the exercises does not mitigate the obligatory nature of the ceremony for … Section 1516 … unequivocally requires the exercises to be held every school day in every school in the Commonwealth. The exercises are held in the school buildings and perforce are conducted by and under the authority of the local school authorities and during school sessions. Since the statute requires the reading of the ‘Holy Bible,’ a Christian document, the practice … prefers the Christian religion. The record demonstrates that it was the intention of … the Commonwealth … to introduce a religious ceremony into the public schools of the Commonwealth. (201 F. Supp., at 819; quoted in 374 U.S. 203 (1963))”